Rumba in Havana

1957's Grand Prix foretold an approaching storm

Rumba in Havana from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

Upheavals as savage as the one beneath the glossy frolic of Cuba in the late 1950s are sometimes impossible to forecast. A jetliner plunges to the ground, or the quaking earth shears the framework of skyscrapers. This was different. In 1957, it was plain to anyone brave enough to use his eyes and voice around Havana that a day of bloody reckoning was coming very fast indeed.

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The pattern for Cuba's tribulations can be dated to 1895, when the national hero José Martí was killed during its war for independence from Spain. Cuban revolutionaries harassed an exponentially larger Spanish force into capitulation, with help from the United States, which declared war on Spain after the USS Maine blew up (perhaps by accident) in Havana's harbor. Early 20th-century Cuba was racked by coups, one of which installed a former army sergeant named Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar as president in 1933. By then, American criminals gorged on Prohibition cash had already embraced Cuba, practically within sight of South Florida, as one big bank for laundering dirty money, with the full support of a tiny, corrupt elite. There was an unlimbered military and police to keep the locals terrorized. Given Cuba's past, everyone should have known it wouldn't work forever.
Bread-and-circuses stratagems tend to pop up in cases like Cuba's, and part of it was a series of three Gran Premio races for sports cars on a Havana street course, a story retold by racer, collector and historian Joel Finn. His book, Caribbean Capers, is flatly the best title ever published on racing in this part of the world. Finn attended two of the three Cuban races, and has been accumulating photos and other historic data on them ever since.
"I had always thought it was a really fascinating deal, but with the revolution, and most of the records being thrown out or disappearing, it was very difficult. I don't use people's old reminiscing in the book. If it wasn't written down as fact at the time, I don't use it. Ninety percent of the stuff was mine, or from collections I bought from photographers who were there," Joel told us.
The great Juan Manuel Fangio bookends this story, winning the first Gran Premio on the 5km seafront circuit, as heavily armed police kept away the great unwashed. The following year, at least six were killed when a Ferrari plunged into the crowd. Fangio, the billed star, wasn't around: Just before the race, he was snatched from the Hotel Lincoln by a Castro revolutionary, and released unharmed after the checkers, to Batista's deep embarrassment. A year later, Batista was in exile. His underlings, symbolizing Cuba's humiliation as a carnival of American vice and bribery, either fled with him or faced rifles.
Caribbean Capers is distributed by Racemaker Press; visit www.racemaker.com.

This article originally appeared in the May, 2011 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.